


troubled spirits on my chest

by imadetheline



Series: Breathe In, Breathe Out [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, FebuWhump2021, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mind Control, Prompt Fill, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:34:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29128077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imadetheline/pseuds/imadetheline
Summary: febuwhump day one - mind control
Relationships: Luke Skywalker & Darth Vader
Series: Breathe In, Breathe Out [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2140389
Comments: 18
Kudos: 96
Collections: Luke and Vader Bonding, febuwhump 2021





	troubled spirits on my chest

Luke feels tired, but it’s not like the exhaustion he’s used to. No, this is more of a heaviness in his limbs, dragging him down, a fuzziness in his head. It’s warm and beckoning as it wraps around him, pulling him into its embrace with indistinct murmurs in his ear. There’s a dark tunnel, and someone is walking ahead of him, but Luke doesn’t quite remember how he got here or even where here is; it doesn’t really matter, though. Nothing really matters. Not when he feels warm and unworried like he hasn’t in years.

He doesn’t feel the need to think about anything, to even move his feet. He’s not sure he’s even connected to his body anymore. But he doesn’t need it.

Distantly, he feels himself move, flashes of green and red around him. But his vision is blurry, and the movements don’t feel like his own. He’s wrapped in blissful darkness that requires nothing more from him than to relax. All the weight and responsibilities of his life are barely flickers of memory in the inky blackness. He never wants to leave.

<<<>>>

Vader feels the change in the Force immediately, the snaking tendrils of the temple reaching out, oily and searching. He throws up shields against them, unworried, still stalking forward down the long, cavernous passage. The wisps of power veer away from the storm he makes in the Force, and he almost smirks under his mask, continuing on, Luke trailing after him.

But they don’t disappear. Vader can feel them hanging just out of reach, building towards something. 

He senses the attack a moment before it happens, and only the Force saves him from dismemberment. His red blade rises to meet green unconsciously as his brain tries to process the image in front of him. 

It’s Luke, pressing his blade against Vader’s. With a brief push from the Force, Vader sends him skidding backward, taking the momentary reprieve to reign in his surprise. He hadn’t expected the attack; his son had promised not to try to escape while they navigated the temple, and Vader had sensed no deceit. He curses himself, drawing upon the endless well of rage bubbling up in his chest. He should have expected this, should never have let his guard down. Of course, the boy was planning to betray him; everyone did, even  _ her. _ So like his mother.

Anger swirls around him in a spiral, and he lunges at Luke, red blade flashing in the darkness. Luke meets him halfway, parrying before he swings the lightsaber around, aiming for Vader’s unguarded side. Vader’s saber is there in an instant, stopping the lethal blow. But he pauses for a moment instead of moving to strike back immediately. Something is off; the Force is writhing around the boy, dark… and snaking.

He snarls, knocking Luke’s blade away. It swings back instantly, red and green sparking between them, and in the flashing light, he sees what he should have noticed immediately: Luke’s eyes. They’re dark and unfocused. Vader’s rage falters for an instant, seeing the blankness in his son’s face.

But then Luke is stepping back, swinging wildly again, and Vader is forced to block. Fear is gripping his heart, tighter than he can remember it ever being. Whatever this is cannot, will not have his son! 

He pushes back against the green saber, not attacking but trying to hold his son there. “Luke!” The only response is a guttural snarl that sends tendrils of Vader’s fear whipping outward. He’s careful that none of them should touch his son. “Release him.” It’s a hiss, a desperate, predatory hiss that threatens violence.

But the thing seems to call his bluff, “What will you do,  _ Darth Vader _ ? Harm your son?” It sneers and then pauses, “Again?”

Rage crashes through Vader, but It knew what It was saying because a moment later, the anger is slipping through Vader’s fingers, replaced by grief and regret. Vader’s saber slips momentarily, but it doesn’t take advantage, just spins the green blade between Luke’s fingers and steps back into the darkness, Luke’s face contorted into an ugly smirk that has no place on the boy’s face, his eyes still unfocused in the green light spilling over his face.

It’s smiling, but it’s too wide, and the darkness flits across Luke’s face revealing glimpses of yellow eyes full of malice before it flashes away, leaving only Luke’s blue ones. “Did you really think you deserved the boy?” It laughs, and the sound freezes Vader to the stone hewn floor, grating and horrifying. Luke is barely recognizable with the expression of malicious amusement painted on his youthful features. “No, Lord Vader, this is what you deserve. To lose the last person in this world you care for, as payment for all those you have taken from others.” 

Vader can’t move, can’t think past the fear and the grief and the pain and the knowledge that It’s right: he doesn’t deserve his son. It cocks its head, eyes flashing yellow as it spins the lightsaber again. And then It lunges. For a split second, Vader contemplates letting It slice through him, letting It end his wretched excuse for a life. But then he sees Luke’s eyes, blue behind the haze, and he yanks himself from his paralysis and blocks. 

The eyes flash yellow again, this time staying longer before they flick back to dazed blue. It snarls, frustrated that Vader is still fighting, features pulling unnaturally in the sparking light of their blades. “What are you going to do, kill him?”

Vader’s anger surges at the mere thought, and he throws his hand out. The Force heeds his call, wrapping snaking tendrils of darkness around Luke’s thin frame. It pulls him backward, immobilizing his limbs, trapping him in a vice-like grip. The green lightsaber tumbles from Its hand, sparking against the rock before the blade extinguishes. Vader’s respirator continues forcing air into his lungs at a steady rate, and he’s grateful because his brain seems to have forgotten such a menial task as breathing. His rage is palpable, the cavern walls trembling beneath the strain of his lashing anger. The body clutched in his grip shifts slightly, and he focuses, tightening his grasp. The sheer power at his fingertips is cold, the rage filling his chest with ice, and his grip tightens further, a red haze over his mind.

And then It’s laughing, grating, and high-pitched, and Vader grits his teeth against the ringing sound. But the sound breaks through his rage-induced haze, and he finally registers Luke’s form, kneeling under the weight of Vader’s grip on him, knees pressed against the uneven ground, face downturned. Even his breaths are shallow between the laughter ripping itself from his vocal cords, as if Vader’s grip is around his lungs, around his throat. And Vader realizes with a start that it is.

He releases it at once, darkness slipping from him as he recoils from the sight in front of him. In his rage, he had almost… No, no, Luke is alive. And he will remain alive. But the thing inside his son is still laughing, pushing itself from the floor. Vader reaches out again, ignoring the peals of laughter, and stops It from rising, careful this time to keep his anger locked away. But in its place, the fear starts creeping back in. He pushes past it, stepping forward until he’s looming over his son’s kneeling form.

The image conjures one of Sidious, standing victorious over Vader, kneeling before his master. And another image of long before that, of windswept dunes and appellations of other masters. Disgust fills him. And he thought he’d wanted this, for the boy to become his apprentice in a life of slavery. He sinks to his knees before the boy, unwilling to tower over him even as his prosthetics protest and grind against ruined flesh. He ignores it, gazing into Luke’s eyes, pleading for the fog in them to clear.

The realization that the laughter has stopped hits him. It’s just staring right back at Vader’s lenses, Luke’s head tilted eerily in the deafening silence, a smile tugging on the corners of his lips, “You will never get him back.”

Vader ignores it, doesn’t let it see how the fear blossoms in his chest. Instead, he only reaches out slowly, gloved hand brushing against Luke’s cheek. It snarls, yellow tinting the blue irises, and tries to turn away, but Vader’s grasp on It in the Force is too strong.

So Vader closes his eyes and reaches for Luke’s mind. It’s like trying to reach through sludge. He can sense that brightness, like a candle flame, but the darkness that’s wrapped around it, trapping it, is thick and pulsing with malice and hate. But Vader pushes and pushes, scraping it aside as he desperately tries to reach that light.

But the darkness pushes back against Vader’s own lances of cold. It presses against the shields on his mind, and Vader grits his teeth, strengthening them even as he digs his mental fingers into the thing and refuses to be expelled from Luke’s mind. But It has other tricks.

A different scene is playing in Vader’s head now, the battle of wills in the cavern before him replaced by the fading light of dusk glinting off the white spires of the Jedi temple. But he’s not paying attention to the beauty of the Coruscanti skyline. No, he couldn’t care less; all his attention is fixed on the blue and white montrals of a retreating figure as she descends the temple steps, disappearing from his sight, his reach.  _ Why did you leave?! _

No, he’s not there. She is gone. He yanks himself from the memory that pulls at something in his heart that had cracked long ago. But even though he knows they are not there, he can feel a strand of beads burning into his palm.

He shoves it down, away, anywhere except in the way of saving his son as he tears away more layers of darkness. But there’s another one to take its place. And now plumes of lava and oppressive heat and burning, always burning, are filling his head. There’s a man there, yelling and pleading, a man who’d taken everything from him. Anger fills him with that cold power, and he rips through darkness. But somehow, it’s weaker than before. The presence,  _ the thing _ , fills his head with triumphant laughter as it turns to durasteel beneath his mental grip. No matter how hard he tears at it, it remains, wrapped around his son’s light, smothering and deadly.

And then another memory, the worst of all, settles before his eyes: a woman, beautiful and distraught.  _ Come back. I love you!  _ He tries to close his eyes, to turn away, but there’s nowhere to go, nowhere to escape what haunts him every hour of his pathetic excuse of a life. She’s crying, and his anger is rising, but it’s not here, not now. Now he can only conjure sadness and guilt and self-hatred. Then he’d been self-righteous and blind.

But the memory is hazy now, like looking at it through transparisteel. No… water. He blinks, and it  _ is _ water: the rushing, thundering power of a waterfall. Molten reds and dust-covered browns are replaced by lush green, swaying in a nonexistent breeze, and the blue of Naboo’s tumbling falls. It’s a blue he’s never been able to conjure properly in memory alone, and his lenses prevent him from ever truly seeing it again. But here, in this vision, it is clear and calming. But it’s nothing compared to her presence. 

She is there, stepping through the tumbling sheet of water, like a nymph from those old Naboo myths she’d whispered to him one night, hand carding through his hair. She is exactly as he remembers her, beautiful and wise, her presence the cool, soothing stream to his fire and sand and heat. She’s dressed in blue, and there are flowers in her dark hair, and her feet don’t disturb the grass as she walks towards him, frozen in her orbit. But she’s there, and she’s reaching for him. Her touch is cold against his bare cheek, whole and unbroken here in his mind, but he leans into it, cherishing the contact he knows he does not deserve.  _ Padme-- _ his voice catches on a sob-- _ I’m so sorry. _

She smiles sadly, grief in every line of her face, but she is strong and standing firmly before him, unwavering.  _ I know, Ani. I forgave you long ago. _

But that is too much; he cannot accept that. His heart was long ago shattered, but the pieces are cracking once more. He does not deserve it.  _ I couldn’t- I didn’t… save you. _

The smile never leaves her face but her thumb brushes across his unscarred cheekbone.  _ No,  _ she concedes, and his eyes slam shut in shame,  _ but there is someone you still could.  _ His eyes jerk open at that, and he remembers. A flash from the scene before his real eyes: his son’s face contorted in pain, eyes unfocused and yellow creeping in at the edges. And then he’s back beneath the waterfall, Padme’s eyes seeing right through him, as they always have.

He looks away, unable to stomach the kindness and love in her gaze.  _ I don’t know how. I’m not strong enough,  _ he admits.

She laughs, not unkindly, and his knees fail him, falling to the grass before her feet. He can’t feel it, knows it’s not real. But his legs hit it all the same, memories and grief at that pure sound of life and happiness that he’d stolen from her. She’s kneeling before him now, their noses almost touching, and all he can think is that she should not be sullying herself by lowering to his level. He does not dare think anything else. But she’s grabbing his face between both her hands now, freezing against his skin, and her eyes are blazing.  _ The  _ darkness _ is not strong enough. You, Ani, have always been strong. You are enough. _ And the pure belief and love in her words are too much. But she doesn’t stop, doesn’t let him look away.  _ He is there, and he is alive, and you can save him. Your son needs you.  _ She wipes a tear from his skin.  _ Our son needs you. _

And she’s smiling, wide and beautiful, and the sadness that permeated her presence is gone, and she shines, angelic and hopeful. And Vader knows this is where Luke received his light from, why he shines like a star.

So he pulls her shining presence into his arms, and he holds her for one more aching moment, and then he lets her go, turning back towards the present, to the darkness, and to his son,  _ their _ son.

No time has passed, the durasteel walls around his son’s mind still strong, the laughing still ringing in the silence. But this time, Vader reaches for the anger, yes, but also for the concern, the desire to shield, the  _ love _ that he hasn’t been able to name in so long. 

  
And what tears through those durasteel walls of writhing, snaking malice is not light, but it is not dark either. But the swirling mists of grey do what neither the light nor the dark had been able; it blasts through the  _ thing _ blocking his son’s light, shredding it between the power in his hands until there is nothing left except the blazing light of Luke collapsing in his arms, eyes blue and clear as the waters of Naboo and the presence of a mother he never knew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> return of the famous temple that i love using for plot reasons lol. anyway I'm going to try to keep up with the prompts but I'm not sure if I'll actually write all of them. but the ones i do write i will post here :)

**Author's Note:**

> If you guys liked it leave a comment. They make my day! Seriously I love reading them so please leave me one cause they motivate me to write more! if you guys have ideas for other stories send me an ask on tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/imadetheline) or just yell about stuff with me. Info about me and all my other tumblrs are [here](https://infoabtmaddie.carrd.co/#)


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